Chapter 5 – Hegel’s Phenomenology

Introduction

In his 1844 Manuscripts, although he promises a critique of Hegel’s dialectic as a whole, Marx pays most attention to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) on the ground that it is ‘the true birthplace and secret of Hegelian philosophy’. [1] Marx is most interested here in trying to situate Hegel’s achievement in relation to his own concept of alienated labour. Hegel’s strengths and weaknesses are evaluated in this light. Hegel’s strength is precisely that he gives full recognition to the problem of estrangement. His weakness is that, in spite of the wealth of social and historical material treated, he considers it ultimately as a problem of consciousness.

After Marx, whose labours remained unknown for nearly a hundred years, it is not until Georg Lukács that the problem of Hegel’s Phenomenology is considered, first and foremost, as alienation and its overcoming. [2] It is hard for us now to realize how original Lukécs was in taking up, as long ago as 1938, the question of Hegel’s concept of ‘Entäusserung‘ (alienation), [3] albeit with he benefit of Marx’s recently discovered manuscripts in front of him. The last chapter of his masterly work The Young Hegel is entitled ‘Entäusserung as the central philosophical concept of the Phenomenology of Spirit‘.

A point of terminology to bear in mind is that the translators of Hegel, and of Marx, do not agree on the rendering of ‘Entäusserung‘ – some give ‘alienation’ and others give ‘externalization’. I prefer, and give here, ‘alienation’. Lukács notes that there is nothing novel about the terms Entäusserung and Entfremdung in themselves. ‘They are’, he says. ‘simply German translations of the English word “alienation”. [4] The alternative to ‘alienation’, namely ‘externalization’ (the closest rendering of Entäusserung from a purely etymological point of view), is liable to be confused with ‘objectification’. It is important to notice this because Marx explicitly distinguishes objectification (Vergegenständlichung) from alienation (Entäusserung). The difference, broadly, is that, while Entäusserung carries the sense of ‘posited as objective’, it also connotes relinquishment, such that an objectivity is set up from which the subject is estranged. Entfremdung is quite unambiguous, and may be tendered as ‘estrangement’. (For further philological information, and a comparison of translations, see Appendix.)

Before embarking (in the next chapter) on Marx’s critical analysis of The Phenomenology of Spirit, let us recall here some of the salient points about its method and results.

Phenomenological Method

In his Introduction (not to be confused with the more famous Preface), Hegel argues that traditional epistemology, worrying itself about the criterion of true knowledge, gets caught up in insoluble contradictions. It itself is making a claim to knowledge, and hence must either appeal to that same criterion (circularity) or to some other criterion (regress). This problem has been called ‘the dilemma of epistemology’. [5] Hegel considers the possibility that we could spare ourselves the trouble of engaging in the epistemological problematic and go straight to scientific work confident that the science itself will provide its own proof of itself; but he rejects this too, because such a claim to positive knowledge, facing other claims to knowledge, as well as commonsensical views, seems helpless to prevail. It asserts itself as true – but so do they. ‘One bare assurance is worth just as much as another’, [6] Hegel comments.

But it is in just such phenomena that Hegel sees the possibility of a way forward. He undertakes ‘an exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance’. This is what he understands by a phenomenology. The exposition of claims to knowledge in this form seems ‘not to be science’ yet Hegel believes that ‘the series of configurations {Gestaltungen} which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education {Bildung} of consciousness itself to the standpoint of science’.[7] In his Preface Hegel likewise speaks of ‘the spirit that educates itself (‘der sich bildende Geist‘). [8] ‘Education’ is too narrow a translation of Bildung if it suggests only formal training, of course; one could even speak here of ‘the spirit that builds itself up’. It is apposite here also to recall the popularity in Hegel’s time of the ‘Bildungsroman‘. A Bildungsroman is a novel that presents the educative effect of the hero’s experience. [9] Thus the Phenomenology, in a similar way, may be understood as the story of the Bildung of spirit. [10] Indeed, Royce argues that the Bildungsroman model certainly influenced Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology; he cites Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.[11] Hyppolite says the same, but draws attention to Hegel’s study of Rousseau’s Émile. [12] Lukács prefers the epithet: ‘an odyssey of spirit’, but also calls attention to Goethe’s work. [13]

There are some very peculiar characteristics of this Bildungsroman of spirit. One relates to method: Hegel’s method depends, he explains, on the dialectical point that when a given claim to knowledge is to be rejected as untrue ‘the exposition of the untrue consciousness in its untruth is not merely a negative procedure’, because if the result of the argument is properly understood as a determinate negation of the original thesis, ‘a new form has thereby immediately arisen’. [14] That is to say, to refute is not simply to deny, but to find relevant grounds for such rejection. Every claim to knowledge has its specific refutation, and this involves consciousness in a new set of commitments. Making progress in this way we generate a complete series of forms of knowledge. Validity appears here not in relation to an external measure but in accordance with what consciousness provides ‘from within itself’ at each stage. As Hyppolite points out, the condition of this method is the assumption that knowledge is a whole. Indeed the whole is immanent throughout the development. ‘Negation is creative’, he argues, ‘because the posited term has been isolated and thus was itself a kind of negation.’ It follows that its negation is in turn a step towards the restoration of the whole. According to Hyppolite, ‘were it not for the immanence of the whole in consciousness, we should be unable to understand how negation can truly engender a content’. [15]

Hegel’s goal is to reach ‘the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself’. [16] Under what conditions could such an absolute resting place arrive? He answers that, ‘in pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien’. Thus, at the point where consciousness grasps its own essence, this will signify ‘the nature of absolute knowledge itself’. [17]

Hegel presents this progression as immanent in the phenomena themselves: for ‘the necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal consciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series’. [18] Consequently, ‘we do not need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas and thoughts during the course of the inquiry’, he says; ‘it is precisely when we leave these aside that we succeed in contemplating the matter in hand as it is in and for itself.’ [19] Hegel takes this so seriously that he says: ‘all that is left for us to do is simply to look on’. [20] The book therefore takes the form, not of Hegel’s refutations and proofs, but, as we said, of a Bildungsroman of spirit in which it develops a more and more comprehensive consciousness of itself and its world.

In the Phenomenology the crucial problem is that of objectivity. However, this is a problem primarily because of the way Hegel construes the relationship of knowledge to its object. More particularly, the problem is: how can consciousness claim to know its object (Gegenstand) when the latter is posited as other than it? Interesting, in view of Hegel’s Swabian origins, is the information M.J. Petry provides: that in the Swabian dialect of Hegel’s day ‘Gegenstand‘ was also synonymous with ‘impediment, opposition, obstacle, resistance’. [21] Any reader of the Phenomenology cannot fail to be struck by the stress laid on the developing activity of consciousness in knowing, and the presentation of the independence of the object as an obstacle to its free movement. Nothing could be further from Locke’s tabula rasa. As the phenomenological dialectic proceeds, the solution to the antinomy of subjectivity and objectivity emerges: consciousness becomes more and more aware that it is its own activity that constitutes the object as an object of knowledge. The very distinction between knowledge and its object is drawn from the point of view of consciousness and is hence to be construed as a distinction falling within consciousness itself. [22]

So, if Hegel begins with a situation in which the knowing self takes it that what stands over against it is objectivity, he overcomes this opposition through showing that every higher shape of consciousness posits the form of knowledge, and the object as it is now known, as more and more adequate to each other. The upshot is Absolute Knowing, in which knowing knows that what appears to it as its object is only itself.

Since the activity of consciousness itself in knowing becomes more and more prominent in the development, it is clear that self-consciousness becomes centrally involved. Equally, if the self is to make itself an object of consciousness, it can only do so (i.e. become known to itself as what it really is) through its own activity, its self-realization. Thus Hegel’s discussion imperceptibly slides into terrain unknown to epistemology. The progress of critical reflection upon the adequacy of knowledge to its object becomes a progress in the history of Geist (spirit or mind). Spirit learns what it truly is (and its relationship to the world of objectivity) at the same time, and in exact proportion, as it becomes what it truly is through manifesting itself in objective form (in morality, in bourgeois life, in the state, in religion), and in so doing it eventually ends its estrangement from its world through identifying itself in it. The relationship of this history to real history is an extremely difficult and controversial topic in Hegelian scholarship; nevertheless, it is clear from the wealth of obvious allusions that Hegel wishes us to bear this connection in mind.

Engels characterizes the Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘the embryology and paleontology of the mind, a development of individual consciousness through its different stages, set in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history’. [23] In answer to those readers who find the historical points of reference appear in a jumble, Lukács points out that these moments occur in their correct historical sequence, but that this sequence is traversed three times. [24] Hegel’s point of departure is the natural consciousness existing as an individual to which objective reality presents itself as given even where socio-historical determinations underly the developing shapes of consciousness. The acquisition of reason makes possible the perception of society and history as the product of activity. With this, the conscious individual enters the second cycle and must traverse the whole path again, understood now in the shape of explicitly social forms of experience. In the ‘absolute’ stage consciousness looks back over the panorama of the whole history of its experience, and by recognizing, recollecting and ordering those moments, spirit grasps the significance of the whole. However, this knowledge too is not just an abstract truth, but is acquired in the dialectic of a specific domain. Thus the third stage once again recapitulates the past in its entirety but on this occasion we no longer find the actual series of moments, but a summary of mankind’s efforts to comprehend reality. The last chapter, on absolute knowing, contains a compressed history of modern philosophy, for example. In it Hegel equates his own philosophy with fully developed absolute knowledge – knowledge as science.

Alienation

Absolute knowledge comprehends that ‘objectivity’, standing over against the ‘subjectivity’ estranged from it, is brought forth only within the self-alienating movement of spirit. Lukács is quite correct, therefore, to see Entäusserung (alienation) as the central philosophical concept of the Phenomenology. Marx points us to the following crucial passage from Hegel’s last chapter in which he employs this term in summarizing his conclusions:

Surmounting the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly to mean that the object showed itself as returning into the self . . . but rather that it is the alienation {Entäusserung} of self-consciousness that posits thinghood {die Dingheit} and that this alienation has not merely a negative but a positive meaning . . . for self-consciousness . . . for in this alienation it posits itself as object, or the object as itself. . . This positing at the same time contains the other moment, that self-consciousness has equally sublated {aufgehoben} this alienation and objectivity too and taken it back into itself so that it is at home with itself in its otherness as such {in seinem Andersseyn als solchem bey sich ist}. [25]

Of great service to Hegel in preserving, while supposedly overcoming, objectivity as a moment in the absolute, is his dialectical category of ‘Aufhebung‘ (sublation). In his Logic Hegel tells us that in ordinary language Aufheben means not only to abolish but also to preserve, and that he intends to take advantage of this double meaning. In his criticism of Hegel Marx comments that ‘Aufheben‘ plays ‘a peculiar role’ in Hegel’s system. In it, affirmation and negation are brought together; thus, in spite of their ‘sublation’ in the course of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, property, the family, civil society, etc. ‘continue to exist’, he points out, ‘but have become moments . . . which mutually dissolve and engender one another, moments of movement’. [26] In the Phenomenology, likewise, ‘Aufhebung‘ preserves alienation in the very moment of retracting it.

How does self-consciousness ‘surmount the object of consciousness’ and ‘take it back into itself’? Very schematically, one could say that, in collecting together the various determinations taken on by the object of consciousness as it is experienced throughout the path traversed by spirit, the totality of these determinations is grasped by spirit as its own self-determination. This comprehension Hegel characterizes as a recollection (Erinnerung). Here we must return to our philological apparatus again, because the second time this term occurs in the final paragraph of the Phenomenology Hegel rakes the opportunity to bring out the etymological possibility of characterizing this as an Er-Innerung, an inwardizing movement – the appropriate counter-movement to an ‘externalization’ (one of the meanings of ‘Entäusserung‘). He says: ‘die Er-Innerung hat sie aufbewahrt . . .’ – ‘the internalization has preserved it’. [27]

Lukács thinks this passage is so important that he quotes it three times. [28] For example: if spirit has created the real objects of the world in the process of ‘Entäusserung‘, ‘it is only logical’, he says, ‘for the reverse process of “Er-lnnerung” to be nothing other than the sublation of the forms of objective reality so created, and their reintegration into the subject’. [29] He points out that, consistently with this, the standpoint of absolute knowledge does not give us any new content: ‘all the contents available’, he says, ‘arise not from philosophy itself, but from . . . the historical process of the self-positing of spirit . . . now . . . illuminated by the light of absolute knowledge’. [30]

It follows from this that the estranged forms taken on by spirit when it posits itself as objective remain as they are. The novelty consists solely in the reconciliation philosophy affords, whereby spirit can feel at home, notwithstanding this estrangement, because, in it, it is in its own other. Indeed, the alienation of self-consciousness is given a positive significance above in that it posits the self as objective. Accordingly Hegel stresses, in another crucial passage, that there is no need to be afraid of such objectification.

‘Spirit’, he recalls, ‘has shown itself to us to be neither merely the withdrawal of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere submergence of self-consciousness into substance.’ Using the language of ‘subject’ and ‘substance’, he explains that ‘spirit is this movement of the self which empties {entäussert} itself of itself and sinks into its substance, and also, as subject, has gone our of that substance into itself. He goes on: ‘that first reflection out of immediacy is the subject’s differentiation of itself from its substance . . . the withdrawal into itself and the becoming of the pure “I” . . .’. But – and this is the important point – ‘neither has the “I” to cling to itself in the form of self-consciousness as against the form of substantiality and objectivity, as if it were afraid of its alienation; the power of spirit lies rather in remaining the self-same spirit in its alienation and, as that which is both in itself and for itself, in making its being-for-itself no less merely a moment than its in itself . . .’. [31]

Thus, because spirit must posit itself in objective form, the objectivity consciousness opposes to itself cannot merely be subsumed away through the inwardizing movement of recollection; its problematical character must be resolved by comprehending it in all the immediacy of its otherness at the same time. Therefore, one must understand the phenomenological odyssey not merely as spirit’s struggle to negate an alien objectivity, but also as the story of its gaining an objective existence, a story understood as such by spirit itself only in recollection when it achieves absolute knowledge, but a story whose meaning is understood from the outset by Hegel and ourselves who ‘look on’ [32] this development precisely from that standpoint. In the middle part of the Phenomenology masses of concrete historical material, including actual estranged spheres of existence (religion, the state, bourgeois life and so forth) are brought within this framework.

The objective shapes given in consciousness as it moves towards self-consciousness and absolute knowing are to be understood as shapes of the existence of spirit itself and hence its positive achievement. This explains why Hegel says that alienation has a positive meaning for self-consciousness in so far as it posits itself as objective, and becomes being-for-itself. It explains also why, whether one looks at the Phenomenology or the Encyclopaedia, one finds that Objective Spirit always occupies a higher place than Subjective Spirit. In both these systematic works the creation of a wealth of spiritual forms, for example, the state, religion and so on, is seen as a positive achievement of spirit as well as entangling it in estrangement. The ‘sublation’ of estrangement consists in stripping the spiritual forms of their ‘external’ character, not abolishing them outright, that is to say, in recognizing them precisely as spirit’s own work.

Spirit in the form of substance gives us the phase of consciousness as consciousness of an objectivity standing over against it; consciousness turned inwards achieves certainty of self and becomes subject; then in the final dialectic the self recognizes that its negative attitude towards objectivity must in turn be superseded through a recognition of the necessity of this self-alienation. In this way we have a positing through negating. Hegel explains this movement thus: if ‘self-consciousness enriches itself till . . . it has absorbed into itself the entire structure of the essentialities of substance’, then ‘since this negative attitude to objectivity is just as much positive, it is a positing’. It has both ‘produced them out of itself’, and in so doing ‘has at the same time restored them for consciousness’. He goes on to explain that ‘in the concept that knows itself as concept, the moments thus appear earlier than the whole in its fulfilment; the movement of these moments is the process by which the whole comes to be’. In consciousness, by contrast, ‘the whole, though uncomprehended, is prior to the moments’. [33]

In his Preface Hegel explains that the exposition will show that truth is not only ‘substance’ – something ‘out there’ to appropriated by the consciousness of the subject – but it is equally ‘subject’ – the activity that produces the true. There follows the famous passage:

Further, the living substance is being which is in truth subject, or, which is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or the mediation of its becoming-other with its own self. As subject it is pure simple negativity and thus the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of. . . opposition. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not an original or immediate unity as such – is the true. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also for its beginning and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. [34]

‘Thus’, he goes on, ‘the life of God and divine cognition can be spoken of as love playing with itself,’ But he immediately qualifies this edifying notion: if, in itself, the divine life is one of untroubled unity with itself in itself, ‘for which otherness and estrangement and the overcoming of estrangement are not serious matters’, this leaves out the fact that its actualization in developed form is necessarily marked by ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labour of the negative’. [35]

In the last chapter he explains that spirit needs time to do this: hence ‘the movement of carrying forward the form of its self-knowledge is the labour which it accomplishes as actual history’. [36] The conclusion of the Phenomenology is that ‘comprehended history’ is the realm of absolute spirit, ‘the actuality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which it would be lifeless and alone’. [37]

If ‘the immediate existence of spirit, consciousness, contains the two moments of knowing and the objectivity negative to knowing’, [38] in the absolute these are united and their difference is mediated in the act of ‘pure negativity’. [39] ‘Our own act here’, says Hegel, ‘has been simply to gather together the separate moments . . .’[40]

However, there may be more to it than this, as far as Hegel’s ‘own act’ is concerned. For in the final chapter of the Phenomenology there is a merger between the standpoint that ‘looks on’ and grasps the nature of the necessity in the transitions as it is known ‘to us’ (rather than in the experience of consciousness itself at that stage) and the standpoint of self-consciousness itself at each stage. This may well mean that Hegel’s ‘absolute’ philosophy represents an arrogant claim, not merely to the discovery of truth, but to the instantiation of it. From Feuerbach [41] onwards critics have charged Hegel with representing his philosophy as ‘the absolute’. A recent example is Peter Singer who says that, in Hegel’s view, spirit comes to its final resting-place when he, Hegel, understands the nature of reality. The momentous conclusion follows that ‘the closing pages of the Phenomenology . . . are no mere description of the culmination of all human history: they are that culmination’. [42]

This point, among others, will be taken up in the consideration of Marx’s critique in the following chapters.

Summary

Hegel’s Phenomenology undertakes an exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance, through a sequence of determinate negations. Absolute knowing knows that what appears as its object is itself. But this requires spirit to know itself through producing itself as alienation (Entäusserung) and then sublating this alienation, such that ‘it is at home with itself in its otherness as such’. Thus the truth of spirit is actual when posited through the negation of the negation. This labour of the negative is at work in the movement of history.

1 Werke Eb., 571; C.W.3, 329; E.W., 383.

2 Hyppolite puts some stress on it in his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (1946), Evanston, 1974. Lukács published his Young Hegel in 1948 but he did not know of Hyppolite when he drafted it in 1938, and he was not able to take account of him when publication became possible after the war. In his Preface (1954) (to a new edition of his study, Lukács dismisses Hyppolite’s reading as ‘irrationalist’ and says it had not given him cause to rework his arguments (p. xi), For Hyppolite’s view of Lukács’ book see his Studies on Marx and Hegel (1955), New York, 1969.

3 For example, H. Glockner did not even list ‘Entäusserung‘, or ‘Entfremdung‘, in his Hegel-Lexikon of 1935-39, a supplement to his jubilee edition of Hegel’s works (1927-30); the terms are still not present in the 2nd revised edition of the Lexikon, Stuttgart, 1957; nor does J. Hoffmneister include them in the index to his 1952 edition of the Phenomenology.

9 Georg Lukács in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958), London, 1963, quotes (p. 112) Hegel on the social purpose of such educative experience: ‘During his years of apprenticeship the hero is permitted to sow his wild oats; he learns to subordinate his wishes and views to the interests of the society; he then enters that society’s hierarchic scheme and finds in it a comfortable niche.’ Unfortunately Lukács gives no source for this remarkably cynical passage, so it is difficult to assess its relevance for the present discussion.

21 See the Introduction to his translation of Hegels Philosophy of Nature, Vol. I, London, 1970, p. 164. It is amusing to see that Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (1979). Cambridge, 1982, characterizes Kojève’s anthropological reading of absolute knowledge as ‘the end of adversity the term which adequately translates Hegel’s Gegenständlichkeit’, p. 28.

22 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 36.

23 Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy, M.E.C.W., . 600.

32 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 85. The text itself can actually be divided according to the point of view in question – see the Appendix to Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), ed. A. Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, New York, 1969.

37 Phenomenology (Miller), para. 85. Judith Shklar explains the inevitability of this conclusion by arguing that for Hegel retrospection was the only certain knowledge ‘because it alone could reveal that men had made their knowledge and that it was the work of their own minds, and not an object to be seized’ – ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology: an Elegy for Hellas’; in Hegel’s Political Philosophy, Z.A. Pelczynski rd., Cambridge, 1971, p. 73.